Since you clicked on this article, you’re likely to know what is Twitch. But for everyone who came here just out of curiosity, here is a brief explanation. Twitch is the Amazon-owned live streaming video platform inhabited mostly by gamers. On Twitch you can watch streamers playing your favorite games just for fun or for hints.
The estimated number of Twitch website visits is 862M per month, and the number of Twitch app installations is more than 50M. Of course, that volume of the audience is a delicious pie for advertisers, and they want a big slice of it. Twitch used to offer to opt out of ads by connecting your account to Amazon Prime but in late August 2018 that stopped to be an option. Now ad-free viewing of streams is only possible by subscribing to Turbo Switch which is $8,99 a month or $107,88 a year. Hundreds of thousands of Twitch users didn’t appreciate their petty move. Some even mentioned the sole reason they subscribed to Amazon Prime is that ad-free Twitch Prime comes along and now it’s pointless to pay $119 a year for a membership.
At the earliest opportunity Twitch paved everything it could over with advertising, making it impossible to enjoy streaming service. Simple switching from broadcast to broadcast lasts forever by reason of endless advertising. The situation is aggravated by the fact that Twitch ads bypass AdBlock and almost every other free ad-blocking extension. It looks like Twitch started implementing the plan to opt out of Prime ad-free option back in 2016, when it began circumventing ad blocking by inserting ads directly into the video stream, making ad-blocking extensions useless. And now, Twitch users are left with only two ad-free options, both paid, Turbo Twitch or an ad-blocking solution.
Our partners wrote a guide on how to block Twitch ads in 2018, and we put its major points in the current article. First, ad-blocker is significantly cheaper than Turbo Switch: $11 for mobile ad-blocker and $27 for Windows PC against $107,88. Second, ad-blocker is more feature-rich than Turbo Twitch: data protection, fighting off phishing attacks and the very ad-blocking against the just ad-free viewing of streams. And third, ad-blocker works throughout device while Turbo Twitch obviously works solely on Twitch.
Taking into account everything written above we have to admit that greedy advertising politics of Twitch and, let’s be honest, of the variety of other online services push us toward using ad-blockers. While people are ready to pay for high-quality services, they are not willing to overpay for something they can get cheaper. Maybe, someday corporations like Amazon will understand it and reconsider their rates, but before that happens, we will use ad-blocking solutions.